Rhea: an icy cratered surface			PIA02273
			The icy, cratered surface of Saturn's moon Rhea is seen in this image taken by Voyager l on Nov. l2, 1980, at a range of 85,000 kilometers as the spacecraft passed over the satellite's north pole. The heavily cratered surface attests to the satellite's ancient age.
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Image Credit: JPL, NASA
The icy, cratered surface of Saturn's moon Rhea is seen in this image taken by Voyager l on Nov. l2, 1980, at a range of 85,000 kilometers as the spacecraft passed over the satellite's north pole. The heavily cratered surface attests to the satellite's ancient age. The largest craters, 50 to l00 kilometers across and several kilometers deep, are freshly preserved in Rhea's icy crust. The craters and landscape resemble those on the Moon and Mercury, and are unlike the flattened crater forms that have collapsed in the soft icy crusts of the Jovian moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa.		Scientists believe that Rhea (which is just l,600 kilometers in diameter, compared to the 5,500-kilometer diameter of Ganymede) froze and became rigid, behaving like a rocky surface, very early in its history.
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